It was a Saturday in September, a beautiful day from the moment I woke up. The two weeks before had been very stormy and it was nice to finally have a warm, sunny day. I was glad it the weather turned out to be decent, since I was spending the day in New York City, about four hours from my house, with a friend of mine and a dozen or so friends of his. I only knew one person from the group I was going with, but everyone turned out to be very kind and like minded. We boarded the train and by four thirty in the afternoon we arrived in Grand Central Station.

We walked around the city for a few hours, the group breaking off in various directions, and I spent the early evening with three other people. After eating some pizza, checking out a few small shops and people watching, it was around 7pm and we headed towards our final destination, an art gallery of a well known artist. There was to be a celebration at his gallery, something I had been to before and enjoyed very much.

We arrived a half hour later, meeting up with the rest of the group and checking in with everyone’s afternoons. After saying hello to some old friends from previous gatherings, everyone began milling around the gallery. There was live music, ranging from mellow guitar to high energy trance as well as several artists painting live. There were a lot of people in the gallery and it soon became very warm.

After briefly checking out what had changed in the gallery since the last time I had visited I met up with a friend of mine who was gracious enough to share some ethnogens with me, a tab of very pure MDA as well as 4 grams of mushrooms, give or take. He also handed me a square of LSD, which I did not end up taking that night. Having taken MDA/mushroom combinations before, what I like to do is take the pill right away and wait until I’m peaking on MDA before ingesting the mushrooms, which is exactly what I did this time around.

Soon the energy hit and I spent some time really taking in the paintings. The artist’s work is remarkable while sober and under the influence of the MDA it was beyond incredible. The longer I looked at each painting, the more I noticed little things that were hidden inside each painting. I understood that each painting was a part of the artist and was grateful to be able to experience his work first hand.

A few hours had passed and with the energy of the MDA pulsing through my body, I decided it was time to unleash and start dancing to some trance and techno. Before doing this, I decided it was about time to ingest the mushroom, so I discreetly pulled them out and munched down the dry, bitter stems and caps. I was rolling nicely and was excited to add a little color to my experience.

I had never been a fan of electronic music before my first MDA experience a few months before. A classically trained musician, I considered electronic music to be the antithesis of what I stood for. After hearing it under the influence, however, I realized the time and energy artists spent making techno was no different than what I was doing. The melding of each layer of techno forms one sound, but after listening carefully each note, each separate layer could be heard. Although it may not seem like it, trance and techno are very similar to classical music in the way they’re written and performed and my appreciation of both grew larger that evening.

Eventually I needed water and a break, so I left the dance area to walk around a bit. I made my way into one of the main gallery rooms and decided to take a look at a few other paintings. Up until this point, things may not seem interesting, but the following incident is the reason I’m writing this report.

As an avid psychonaut, both with and without the use of mind altering substances, I have been looking searching for enlightenment since I first learned what meditation was when I was ten years old, in fifth grade. I have spent anywhere from an hour to two hours each day meditating, having recently added yoga into my repertoire. I began the use of psychedelics in hopes they would help me in my quest.

Staring at one of the artist’s paintings depicting various human accomplishments during the course of known history, I soon began thinking about God, or what people perceive as God, as well as religion. I could feel the mushroom pulse hit me, the waving feeling I always get with the come up. The painting began speaking to me, not in words of course, but it was showing me the path of mankind.

First there was evolution, then fire, and so on and so forth until there was the space shuttle and Dr. Martin Luther King. Everything was on a path, a path that was set, but not set in stone. We as humans can choose our paths, but essentially we are destined to do what we as humans do. There is slavery but we realize the error of our ways and abolish slavery. The small steps are our own choice, but the big picture is part of a path.

As I stare the picture, which is at least double the height of me and double the width, my mind begins to understand the “big picture.” There is something bigger than me, bigger than Earth, bigger than Jesus, bigger than God. My mind is swirling with thought as the power of the MDA and mushrooms pulse through my body full force. Bigger than God, what can be bigger than God? The universe…..THE COSMOS.

My mind is on fire, I feel I may have reached the answer to my lifelong question, what is God, why are we here, what is after death, when it hits me: God is too small! Humans created God as a sort of middle man to understand the universe, because we couldn’t understand why the sun rose or why people die. Nowadays, people have mostly discarded God because of science. I realized at this very moment that it doesn’t matter if people believe in God because he doesn’t exist, Heaven as a “life after death” doesn’t exist because what REALLY exists is BETTER than life after death, BETTER than “God,” BETTER than ANYTHING we could EVER have imagined!!!

Hurling around the sun on this globe, we are all just a part of something so large and incredible, we as humans are unable to comprehend and therefore need to create religion to explain the unexplainable. Religion has a place, but the reason so many people leave the church as I had, brought up Catholic but so unfulfilled, is because there’s no room for growth. It now hit me that religion is a part of the cosmos, but only a small part, Jesus is real, but he’s only a part, not the end all, be all, not the alpha and omega, just a tiny part of a wildly huge and magnificent thing!
Religion, I realized, should be treated like school, go and learn until you can’t learn anymore, take what you’ve learned and apply it to your life, then move on. Move on to the next religion, or move on to something more important. Religion can only teach so much, after that it’s just repetition. You’ll never learn calculus by going to algebra class your whole life, you need to take what you know and move to the next level.

As my mind was exploding with these thoughts, my friend from home came over to me. He’s an experienced psychedelic user and, apparently being able to tell I was in thought, did something to me that a friend had done to him a while back. I turned to him and he asked me to reach for something in the front pocket of his backpack. I reached in and, inside, was a bottle cap. My mind, having been lost in the cosmos was flipping. I looked over at him in confusion and despair and he looked back at me.
“There’s nothing in here!” I exclaimed.

He looked at me with wide eyes. “What did you think was going to be in there?”
I paused a moment, embarrassed to say what I thought was inside, but upon his urging I told him. “The universe.”

When I reached inside the bag, I fully believed I would be thrust inside the swirling whirlwind of the universe, both immersed in it as well as able to hold it in my hand. It’s a feeling I’m not exactly able to describe except for the fact that I was very disappointed to find a water bottle cap.

“Disappointing, huh?”, he asked. He was fucking with my mind and it was working.
“Very.” I replied, not being able to say much more than that.

My mind was blown. I had to walk around a little to shake off the feeling of knowing things others didn’t know. I wanted to let everyone know how stupid and unimportant possessions are, how petty little quarrels and big wars are, how in the grand scheme of things NOTHING MATTERS yet at the same time EVERYTING MATTERS. I wanted to tell people that the energy they use to hate could equally be used to love. In the grand scheme of things, life is too important to waste on things but should be spent on loving each other.

I was shook up by my revelation and was unable to think properly for a while. After the backpack incident, I thought I was totally sober, thrust back into reality, but after a few minutes I could feel the trip reemerge. Really and truly, I felt like I knew too much to be on earth, I felt I should have been granted access to the next level, whatever that may be, I felt earth was too small for me, I wanted something bigger, even if that meant dying to find it. For a minute, I wanted to die, just to see what else was out there, waiting for me.

Of course I wasn’t able to die and had to live on earth and continue to go to my pointless job everyday until what I really want to do takes off. I didn’t know what else to do at that point, so I went and danced for a little while, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I spent the rest of the night in another room, listening to some relaxing guitar playing/vocal moaning and at 4 in the morning, the celebration ended, we headed back for the train to take the long ride home.

I have taken a variety of substances in the past, searching but never finding. I finally feel I have found what I have been searching for all these years. I still meditate and practice yoga as well as take the occasional weekend psychedelic, although I now feel more relaxed when I use them, like I can enjoy the trip more without worrying what I can get out of the trip. I used to feel like I was always searching while on acid or mushrooms or MDA/MDMA, but now I can just have fun. All of my trips are enjoyable now; all the weight has been lifted off of me. I am happy.

When I hear of people getting upset on psychedelics I wish I could give them my healing thoughts, but I can’t. Many people jump into “drugs” for many reasons, but spiritual enlightenment isn’t always the point. When they realize how tight and weak their minds are, it can scare them. I feel that my dozen or so years of meditating and mind searching has given me the mental strength to not only handle psychedelics, but also to utilize them as the tools they are.

I am now free from searching and, at age 24, know what I believe is the meaning of life. This isn’t something I go around preaching, since I know people won’t understand or, honestly, even be interested in, but it gives me the hope and power and guidance to live each day the best I can. I don’t believe in a Heaven like most people do, life after death and meeting loved ones, but I do believe there is something after we die, I guess I’ll just have to wait to find out what it is. I am so happy and grateful to have experienced this, I wish more people were open to psychedelic drugs. I know it doesn’t make world peace possible, but I do believe it would make everyone’s own life a little better.